For now, it is Palestinians who are being killed and displaced. But ideologies of supremacy and domination threaten us all- In Gaza, we’ve seen horror unfold with global powers’ support. Is that a blueprint for elsewhere?

Opinion 

Israel 

Ahdaf Soueif 

Fri 11 Sep 2026 

Last week, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, put out an AI-generated video that showed a conveyor belt of overweight Palestinian prisoners – dreaming of food and education – entering one of his prisons; he pops the dream bubbles above their heads and they come out emaciated and crying. Ben-Gvir is building an execution site for Palestinian prisoners with spectator booths, and he recently showed up at Damon prison in northern Israel and taunted female prisoners who complained about the poor conditions. He is digging a moat around a new high-security jail and planning to introduce crocodiles to patrol it. In all this, he has the approval of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while the law that he championed mandating the death penalty for Palestinians deemed terrorists by military courts and convicted for lethal attacks is built on public support.

Sometime around 2017, many Palestinians and their supporters in the global media felt a change. Articles about Palestine no longer drew the hate mail we’d been accustomed to and events in support of Palestinian rights were hardly heckled. It seemed that people were less and less convinced by the image long cultivated by Israel and its supporters – the bearer of “western values” in the Middle East, the home to the “most moral army in the world”, a country acting only in self-defence – while it regularly assaulted Gaza and continued to expand its illegal settlements in the West Bank.

It had been a widely held tenet that if enough people in the democratic western world knew the reality of what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, they would pressure their governments, and Israel would be made to observe the norms of international law. Eventually, a reality would be born in which Jews, Muslims and Christians would live as equals within some political system that would be as good – and as flawed – as others. South Africa was always cited as the example, where rising international pressure over the decades was decisive.

But what looked like the winning of the moral, rational argument was offset by an acceleration of the processes of occupation, an increase in the frequency and blatancy of settler attacks in the West Bank, and of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attacks on Gaza...READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/11/gaza-horror-global-powers-support-blueprint-palestinians-israel

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United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner Volker Türk stresses that respect for human rights, international law & accountability are essential to building lasting peace...

High Commissioner Türk updates Human Rights Council: Human rights are carriers of hope

07 September 2026

63rd session of the Human Rights Council - GENEVA

Trilingual version (PDF) 

Mr. President, 
Excellencies, 
Distinguished participants,

We live in an age of extremes.

Raging wars, painful polarization, climate chaos, and head-spinning technological change make people feel disoriented and even powerless.

Strong forces are working to create and sustain that feeling.

Tech moguls, populists, and vested interests, amplified by social media echo chambers, tell us these trends are inevitable.

In fact, the opposite is true.

History is full of brave people who took action to resist oppression and demand their rights. People who called out injustice and inequality. People who refused to accept their fate, coming together to channel the universal values that underpin our humanity.

This truth is a force to be reckoned with, underpinning all we are doing.

The past years have been marked by a growing number of armed conflicts, and diminishing respect for international human rights and humanitarian law, and the United Nations Charter itself.

There are now more than 60 wars involving at least one State – the highest number since the end of the Second World War. The surge in conflict between States takes us into particularly dangerous territory.

I am alarmed by the resumption of attacks between the United States and Iran, affecting the entire Gulf region. Recent reports of civilian deaths and injuries, including at a wedding in Hormozgan province, are particularly concerning. The geopolitical and economic impacts of this entirely avoidable crisis are again reverberating around the world, and I appeal for an immediate return to negotiations.

Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, now in its fifth year, is on a menacing trajectory, with soaring civilian casualties and intensified attacks on energy infrastructure. While the overwhelming majority of civilians killed are Ukrainians, there are also reports of growing numbers of deaths and injuries in Russia.

I am horrified by reports that fully autonomous drones launched by the Russian Federation killed three Ukrainians last month. Ukraine has reportedly also field-tested such weapons. I join calls for the urgent prohibition of weapons that can take lives without human involvement.

There is only one way out of this madness: peace negotiations that respect the UN Charter.

In its fourth year, the war in Sudan is expanding. Parties to the conflict continue to launch attacks on markets, hospitals, fuel stations and other civilian infrastructure. I urge the Council to focus on the deteriorating situation in Kordofan, Blue Nile, and North and West Darfur, where civilians are at imminent risk. Again, there needs to be an immediate ceasefire, an end to foreign involvement, and a return to inclusive civilian rule.

In Gaza, Israel has killed more than 1,300 Palestinians in daily strikes, despite the ceasefire that was announced almost a year ago, according to figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. It continues to restrict the entry of humanitarian aid. I am appalled by Israeli proposals for the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, and the constant stream of dehumanising rhetoric by some senior officials.

I am also troubled that armed groups affiliated with Hamas have executed and tortured several Palestinians suspected of collaboration.

In the West Bank, Israel’s annexation is unfolding, unobstructed, despite the clear ruling of the International Court of Justice. What more will it take for States to take action to prevent the entrenchment of occupation across land earmarked for Palestinians under the two-state solution? They need to end the transfer to Israel of arms that risk being used to violate international law. Companies also need to end business practices that support illegal settlements.

We need far greater efforts by the international community towards sustainable peace, in which Palestine and Israel live side by side in equal dignity and rights, in line with UN resolutions and international law. Words of condemnation ring hollow in the face of deliberate violations and suffering.

In Lebanon, Israeli forces must end attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. My Office’s assessment team is investigating violations committed by both Israel and Hezbollah since 2 March; this is crucial for truth-telling and accountability.

Beyond these conflicts, there are many places around the world where people are neither at war, nor at peace.

Negotiations are breaking down. Ceasefires are disregarded.

I am concerned about renewed hostilities in South Sudan and escalating tensions in Yemen. I urge the parties to exercise restraint and the international community to do all it can to avert a return to all-out war.

And I again urge the Houthis... READ MORE  https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements-and-speeches/2026/09/high-commissioner-turk-updates-human-rights-council-human-rights 

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Miliband rejects chief rabbi’s claim that West Bank sanctions put UK Jews at risk. Foreign secretary says Sir Ephraim Mirvis wrong to suggest measures against Israeli settlements will make British Jews less safe

Ed Miliband said the UK government’s sanctions, coordinated with France, Canada and nine other countries, were the ‘right thing to do’. Photograph: James Manning/PA

Aletha Adu Political correspondent

Wed 9 Sep 2026

Ed Miliband has rejected warnings from the UK’s chief rabbi that the government’s sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements will make British Jews less safe, as he emphasised ministers can confront the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government while also fighting antisemitism.

The foreign secretary announced sweeping sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Tuesday, with the government taking the position that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory was unlawful.

The measures were coordinated with France, Canada and nine other countries that were also introducing sanctions on Israel over the increasing expansion of settlements, which the UK government says is threatening the future of a Palestinian state.

In a joint statement, leaders including Andy Burnham, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney said: “The time has come to take further action to uphold our commitment to protect the two-state solution, our interests and to stand up for our values, before it is too late.”... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/sep/09/ed-miliband-rejects-chief-rabbi-claim-west-bank-sanctions-british-jews-less-safe

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"Perhaps the most terrifying thing about Gaza was not that the world allowed it to happen. It was discovering that Gaza was only the beginning...."

Doctor, sometimes a writer. Revealing hidden stories, a voice for the unheard. Witness to humanity's darkest depths. Palestine https://hope-heal.org/  

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https://x.com/ezzingaza/status/2096672691130703996 

Dr. Ezzideen

@ezzingaza

Perhaps the most terrifying thing about Gaza was not that the world allowed it to happen. It was discovering that Gaza was only the beginning.

 

All the speeches, protests, resolutions, international laws, red lines, condemnations, and promises of “never again” have apparently taught this monster nothing.

 

This morning, Israeli strikes completely destroyed Ghandour Hospital in southern Lebanon.

 

Another hospital !! Another building once meant for healing reduced to rubble.

 

We watched hospitals in Gaza bombed, besieged, evacuated, burned and destroyed. We were told Gaza was exceptional. We were told the world was watching. International institutions issued statements. Governments expressed “concern.”

People marched through capitals demanding that there must be a line even war is not allowed to cross.

 

And now we are watching those lines disappear somewhere else.

 

Again.

We are living through a dark age in which military power and money seem capable of crushing almost everything humanity spent generations pretending was sacred: international law, hospitals, homes, places of worship, trees, memory, and human life itself.

 

And perhaps that is what terrifies me most.

 

Not only that these things are being destroyed, but that the world is being trained to watch their destruction and continue with its day.

 

A hospital becomes rubble. A neighborhood disappears. A family becomes photographs. Another condemnation is written.

 

And elsewhere, people wake up, drink their coffee, go to work, come home, and sleep.

 

I once believed that knowing what happened would be enough to make humanity afraid of repeating it.

 

Now I understand the more terrible possibility:

Human beings can know.

They can remember.

They can build museums to the dead, teach their names in schools, write “never again” above their graves; and still allow another human being to become rubble.

 

It happened.

Therefore it could happen again.

 

Perhaps the mistake was believing that “again” would look exactly like the first time.

 

If hell is a place where power can destroy human beings, homes, hospitals, memory, and life itself, while those who built laws to prevent it discover that their laws cannot make it stop, then perhaps hell does not require another world.

 

Perhaps it requires only this one,

and enough people willing to continue their day.

 

#SurvivalTestimony

 

"A state banning “dates from Ma’ale Adumim [a city in the West Bank]” while “continuing to licence the equipment used to enforce the checkpoints around it” had not “changed its relationship with the occupation … It has rearranged its communication strategy.” UN expert Francesca Albanese calls for ‘true paradigm shift’ as Miliband resets policy on Israel Exclusive: UN special rapporteur on occupied territories says ban on goods from settlements ‘important’ but must go further if it is to amount to more than a ‘press release’

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said she would not join people dismissing policy as ‘theatre’ before details announced. Photograph: Jordi Ruiz Cirera/The Guardian

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic Editor

Mon 7 Sep 2026  

The UK’s planned ban on trade with unlawful Israeli settlements is a welcome, if overdue, first step and must be judged according to its practical impact, a UN expert has told the Guardian.

The UK foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, has vowed to act more decisively against Israeli settlements, as well as continued restrictions of aid into Gaza, prompting the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, to claim on Saturday that Downing Street was motivated by “Jew hatred”.

Miliband said what he had been told about restriction on aid into Gaza had reinforced the need for more decisive action. But Huckabee, writing on X in support of the Israeli foreign ministry’s own criticisms, said: “The Brits have lost it. The Jew hate of their government knows no boundaries and knows no facts.”

Huckabee did not mention in his statement that Miliband is himself Jewish. The Israeli foreign ministry had said: “Had the foreign secretary been interested in facts rather than stories, he would have known that there are no restrictions whatsoever on bringing medicines into the Gaza Strip, and that no medicine is being blocked.”

Palestinian groups in the UK are holding judgment until they see the fine detail of Miliband’s policy, due to be announced on Tuesday, but are expecting the most significant shift since a previous foreign secretary, David Lammy, withdrew most arms export licences in September 2024.

Speaking to the Guardian, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied territories, said a “ban on settlement goods was a change in UK government stance and absolutely important”. She added she would “not join those dismissing it as theatre before the details had been announced”.

She said a settlement trade ban would have to be part of “a true paradigm shift to Israel-Palestine that ultimately seeks to implement the international court of justice advisory opinion in 2024”, which stated that Israel’s presence in the occupied territories was “unlawful in its entirety”. The opinion, she added, said that “all states carry an obligation – not a preference of an obligation – not to recognise the situation as legal, and not render aid and assistance in maintaining it”.

Albanese also said the trade ban could not be narrowly confined to goods – such as agricultural products and cosmetics – since “they are a fraction of what sustains the occupation, and a fraction that Israel can absorb without difficulty”.

The package should also aim to include trade in services, she said, progressively suspending British intelligence cooperation, all arms licensing and the unexamined flights out of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. Albanese warned that if the steps were not taken or were “completely off the table”, the changes would “over time come to be seen as not amounting to a reckoning, but a press release”... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/07/un-francesca-albanese-miliband-israel-palestine-settlements-trade?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

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New Maps Show How Israel Has Thwarted Hopes for a Palestinian State

Palestinians collect belongings from their evacuated homes after the Israeli Army issued a number of short-term access permits for residents of the occupied West Bank refugee camp of Tulkarm, on June 17th.Photograph by Majdi Mohammed / AP

The breakneck expansion of settlements in the West Bank has rendered American talk of a two-state solution increasingly irrelevant.

By David D. Kirkpatrick

 

August 29, 2026  The New Yorker

Ten years ago, Frank Lowenstein, then the United States special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, presented President Barack Obama with maps of settlements by Israeli Jews in the occupied West Bank. The maps revealed that a chronic problem had turned critical. The expansion of settlements crisscrossing the West Bank threatened the hope of establishing a contiguous Palestinian state there. As Jews and Palestinians lived in roughly equal numbers in Israel and the territories it had occupied since 1967, those settlements also imperilled Israel’s claim to be both Jewish and democratic. By gradually accomplishing a de-facto annexation of the West Bank, the settlements would require Israeli Jews either to rule over a resentful non-Jewish population of about equal size or to surrender the Jewish identity of their state. From the perspective of the United States, either scenario would undermine the stability of the region.

Obama was in the final weeks of hinterntional lawis Presidency, and Lowenstein’s maps helped persuade him to let the United Nations Security Council pass a resolution condemning the settlements, which most of the world had long considered violations of international law. (The U.S. declined to exercise its veto and abstained from the vote.) In a speech a few days later, on December 28, 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry defended that decision with a stark warning that settlement expansion was “increasingly cementing an irreversible one-state reality.” He continued, “Is ours the generation that gives up on the dream of a Jewish democratic state of Israel living in peace and security with its neighbors? Because that is really what is at stake.”

Ten years later... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/new-maps-show-how-israel-has-thwarted-hopes-for-a-palestinian-state    

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